


i can tell you the telling gets old

by misandrywitch



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Lie Low At Lupin's, Non-Linear Narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-10
Updated: 2016-03-10
Packaged: 2018-05-24 11:16:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6151897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misandrywitch/pseuds/misandrywitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's July. They're sitting on the edge of it. And it's a beginning. And it's a bookend. They've lived through one war, or a thousand of them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i can tell you the telling gets old

**Author's Note:**

> title comes from 'the predatory wasp of the palisades is out to get us!' by sufjan stevens
> 
> me forcing everyone around me to read remussirius in 2016 (john darnielle voice) YOU ARE COMING DOWN WITH ME HAND IN UNLOVABLE HAND. thanks to mari & sohmer, who read a very early draft of this nonsense & helped beat it into shape. also thanks to jamie who described her state after this fic as 'the tenderest pulled pork sandwich.' & as usual & always thanks to cait for putting up with my BULLSHIT & generally being the best. hopefully this is out of my system for another year. 
> 
> shittybknights.tumblr.com.

 

The entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell. Unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of time

(Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out, Richard Siken)

 

 

 

 

 

Eliot says that April is the cruelest month. That’s his opinion, of course, but Remus would beg to differ. Summer is the cruelest season. July, maybe, hot and long when it should be short, short when it should be long. When you’re young and your friends are hundreds of miles away, summer is an eternity. James always complained about it going too quickly, but James had always been good at filling every moment up full to bursting. Remus didn’t know how to do that.

  
Summer, in childhood, feels like twelve years. Remus knows exactly how long twelve years is.

 

 

 

 

 

(1995)

 

A month goes by and the days themselves feel like a crawl, soft and quiet and covered with an unusually overcast sky. Remus works, and takes walks, and makes tea, puts two mugs into the sink and washes them out, makes up two beds every night. Nobody has slept in his bedroom since he left this house after the war, and when he’d come back after his father had died it had felt too strange, like it didn’t belong to him. He’d moved his things into the room that had been occupied by his parents, mixed his own books in with the ones his father left behind. A month goes by and they wait to see what is going to happen next, and it reminds Remus of being nineteen and waiting for the very same thing.

He doesn’t know if he can do it over again, but he also knows he has to. He doesn’t say that out loud but he can tell Sirius is thinking it too. That’s a surprise. He was honestly never very good at it.

Things come out, piece by piece. Sirius tells him everything he knows about what happened at the end of the school year a little bit at a time. He talks about where he went after his escape. He doesn’t talk about Azkaban.

“I’m sorry,” he says unexpectedly one afternoon, and Remus doesn’t move because he doesn’t know what he means. Sirius is leaning with one elbow resting on the handle of the shovel he’s got shoved in the dirt, because he decided for some reason to dig up the overgrown garden in the backyard. None of Remus’s clothes fit him right but they come closer now than they ever did before.

“For not writing when I came back,” Sirius says, shrugs one shoulder. “To keep an eye on Harry, I mean.”

“Oh,” Remus is relieved that’s all it is because an apology-- an apology can be so big. It can also mean nothing at all. He doesn’t know how to apologize for the things he’s done to Sirius. He doesn’t want to hear Sirius try to apologize for anything that’s not his fault. “That’s alright,” he says. “The Ministry did come knocking after they were sure you’d left the Hogwarts grounds. Some things never change, I suppose.”

“Figured you’d tell me it was a bad idea,” Sirius wipes his brow line and smiles and it’s strange how familiar that look is. It’s been a year and Remus has spent it rearranging everything he thought he accepted about what had happened to find the picture he’s parsed out makes perfect sense in a way the old facts never had. He’d never tried to pick them apart. He’d just wanted to forget, and he hadn’t done a very good job of that.

“It was a bad idea,” he says. “But I wouldn’t have told you that.”

Sirius looks at him, his eyes grey and clear and tired, and smiles, and then he turns back to the garden. Remus goes inside, and the sun goes down, and Sirius knocks dirt off the shoes he’s wearing and washes dirt from under his nails and sits on the back porch. It overlooks a cliff and the ocean and the wind is always worse on this side of the house than it is on the other one. Summer night sky, stars stretching out forever, and the ocean beyond that, the sound of the sea. The moon is large and white, a sliver away from full. Remus can feel it up every inch of spine, in his jaw, in pressure under his eyes and in his nails and teeth and throat. Old blood in the back of his throat, hot copper on the front of his teeth.

They’d all come here once, one memorable week in summer when they were sixteen, spent long days exploring the cliffs and tracking sand into the house and making the villagers furious. It had been right before a full moon then, too, and Remus had tried to hang onto every moment before they’d left. He’d replayed them in his head when his father had locked the basement door. It would be poetic to say that thoughts of his friends helped, sometimes, but of course it didn’t make any difference, not really.

“Because James and I nicked a load of beer from the pub’s storeroom while you distracted the owner,” Sirius says when Remus mentions it, and he laughs a little because it’s almost phrased like a question. But that was what happened. “And his palms were covered in splinters for the rest of the week.”

“And we drank it all on the beach and hid the bottles, and my mother was furious,” Remus says, a confirmation. He swings his feet where they’re hanging off the porch.

“She was a saint,” Sirius says.

“She loved you to bits, you know.”

“I know.” She’d died before any of it happened, and at the time Remus had almost been glad. He never had the chance to explain what he and Sirius were to her-- but he never had to explain what Sirius had done, either. What he thought Sirius had done.

“Are you hungry?” Remus asks. When he stands up the joints in his knees pop, and so does his back, and his jaw clicks and his hips shift awkwardly. His legs ache more often than not these days, and his walk is permanently marked with a limp.

Sirius makes a noncommittal noise in his throat. He’s always hungry. It’s been a month, and the shadows under his eyes are still there but his collarbones are a little less sharp. “You shouldn’t have gotten up,” he says. “I can-- well-- make toast.”

“Then make toast,” Remus says. Sirius is an abominable cook. Some things never change. “Just please don’t burn the house down. I’ll make something to put in between it.” Behind him, Sirius stands up but he doesn’t follow him. Remus can feel him run his fingers through his hair and then drum them on the railing, all in staccato, as clearly as he can hear it. Remus’s entire body aches and itches.

“It’s a bit too early in the evening for arson. Remus--” he says. It sounds like an afterthought, but Remus turns around anyway. Sirius’s shoulders are hunched in towards each other, curved down and away from him, and he turns around so fast that Remus is startled. Maybe it’s because he’s started that he doesn’t see what happens next because Sirius closes the gap between them with two steps before Remus can blink. His hand lands on Remus’s elbow, on the inside where the skin is thin and not marked by any scars, right at the spot where Remus’s sleeve stops. He thinks for a moment it might be unintentional until Sirius’s fingers tighten just a little, anchoring them both there for a second, a moment in time. Remus looks over at him and Sirius doesn’t look back, and his hands are warm on Remus’s elbow, and he doesn’t remember holding his breath but he is.

 

When Sirius lets his arm go, he can still feel the pressure of his hand against his skin.

  
  
“What?” he says, uneasy, off kilter. His heart rate is up and a little unsteady and he knows it’s because of how close the full moon is, how is senses are all raw and on edge.

“Nothing,” Sirius says, and walks past him into the kitchen.

 

 

 

 

 

Remus goes to bed that night and he thinks about it, the things that are different and the ones that are the same. At fifteen, at twenty, Sirius had always been in the middle of everything, propping his elbows on shoulders and slinging his arms around necks. Climbing into James’s bed. Poking Peter with his elbows to make him laugh. He’s quieter, now, harder, more cautious, and Remus knows that’s the shadow of so many things in the space between them, Azkaban and the war and what they used to be, what they never were.

  
  
And the effect of his hand on Remus’s elbow felt just the same now as it did then.

 

 

 

 

 

(1978)

 

It should be impossible, Remus thought, to completely and successfully avoid someone who you live in the same room with. He’d done it himself of course, after the Prank and all that had followed, but he’d all but moved into the library for two months and Sirius almost never went into the library unless he was there for some express purpose, either to bother Remus or work on the Map, though that was of course quite recent and a group project. So to bother Remus.

Or kiss Remus, apparently. Remus was still wrapping his head around that one, thought it was undoubtedly the reason Remus hasn’t seen him for an entire week. He felt it, on the corner of his mouth, and an utter sense of disbelief had transformed into a determination to lay the matter to rest, to put it out of his mind. It was something he thought he had gotten over quite a long time ago, and yet he was seventeen years old and carrying it around with him, a secret strange heat in the corner of his mouth, something in between fear and shame and anger and excitement.

Remus had always been very good at being at odds with his body and with his thoughts. This was nothing new. He could have hidden it away forever if Sirius hadn’t gone and done what he did, but he had, of course. Because of course he had.

It took a week for Remus to make up his own mind, to chart out a course of action and a plan of attack, and all the way he thought about how Sirius’s long, strong fingers had caught his chin but also the way he’d practically tripped over his own feet trying to leave the room.

When he recalls how it happened, later, it was less about the details and more about how it felt, and Remus likes details, holds onto them. But he barely remembers dragging himself to every end of the castle and all across the grounds and how Sirius was in the very last place he’d thought to find him, their room. He does remember the expression on Sirius’s face, and how his own pulse had jumped up so fast that his head hurt. He remembers what he said, after he’d slammed the door shut behind him and practically shouted at Sirius that he couldn’t leave as Sirius started to get up off his bed and flee.

“I need you to tell me what that was about,” he said, and the statement sounded matter-of-fact in his head but came out somewhere between hysterical and mean because he was, for some reason, unable to control the volume of his voice.

Sirius stared at him for a long second, rigid, widened eyes. Then he visibly relaxed and laughed, the one he used when he was making fun of someone. “A laugh,” he said. “You know. A joke, right? Ha ha, funny, right?” He grinned, and it would’ve been convincing to anyone who didn’t know him very well.

Any other day, any other thing Remus might have accepted that as an answer but it’s not any other day and this was this. Any other day, Remus might have shouldered the burden of Sirius’s selfishness because it’s something he’d gotten quite good at. He understood the source of the selfishness that snakes into meanness and cruelty, and he knew it was something close to a survival instinct as much as it is an old habit Sirius couldn’t always shake. Remus didn’t like it much, but he understood it.

But this was this.

It felt like having a fire lit under his nervous system, seeing the thread of a particularly great plotline, his stomach up somewhere near his nostril and his lungs flip-flopped inside his chest.

“I don’t believe you,” he said, and years later he can’t begin to understand what inspired him to say that at all.

 There was more talk, a little bit, but that isn’t what Remus remembers. He remembers the look on Sirius’s face, and then his laughter, and then what it had felt like to feel that laughter rather than see it or hear it, against his mouth and the line of his jaw.

 

It’s ironic, of course, later, when that’s the thing he can’t bring himself to say out loud.

 

Remus played a lot of chess with his mother, as a kid. It was something to do, something to wrap the mind around. They played it at home and in strange clinics where someone was always offering a solution and on a board balanced on the armrest between car seats as they drove from one place to another. Remus’s father didn’t play very often, and his mother usually beat him right away. She was very good at it. She would let Remus win, sometimes, and he remembers the first time he actually beat her and the way she had smiled. She often said he had the right mind for it, capable of thinking many steps ahead but also capable of creativity, just enough spontaneity to remain unpredictable. Remus didn’t really believe her, but he still took a lot of satisfaction from winning all the same.

Peter was alright at chess, James good but far too impatient. Lily could give him a run for his money.

Sirius’s mouth on his was a new move on a gameboard that Remus wasn’t familiar with, one he didn’t know the rules to even though they’d been playing it for a while. They both stumbled into it. Two steps forward, three steps back, until the next move is Sirius’s mouth on his mouth and the way he held his breath and how he looked nervous. Sirius almost never looked nervous. They played out their moves in hallways with nobody else around, in corners, in passing with the doorjam of their bedroom pressed into Remus’s back and Sirius’s smile caught in the corners of his mouth. A long-running game became a shared secret and Remus couldn’t help but think, “This time, we might just be winning.”

It was less funny later, when the silence settled between them was filled with suspicious and doubt and things neither of them actually said out loud. The thought of always trying to be one step ahead was a lot less funny later, when Remus didn’t know what side Sirius was playing from.

 

 

 

 

 

(1995, but earlier)

 

They sit at the kitchen table and Sirius eats three sandwiches and then sits with his hands wrapped around the mug of tea Remus passes him, because Remus makes tea as a defense against a lack of anything else to do. He wonders when Sirius learned to exist in something other than constant, restless motion. He wonders why that bothers him so much.

“Dumbledore asked me to-- I don’t have to--” Sirius says slowly.

“It’s fine,” Remus says. “Is Harry alright?”

“I don’t know,” Sirius says. He frowns, and it darkens his eyes so they’re less quicksilver than shadow. “Dumbledore made him spell out everything that happened-- I asked him not to-- but he did it, like Dumbledore asked.” Sirius sighs, rotates the mug in his hands. “He’s a tough kid.”

“He reminds me of Lily,” Remus says, before he can stop himself. “He looks so much like James, but--”

“Yeah,” Sirius says, and he looks up and meets Remus’s eye. There are a thousand things Remus wants to say and to ask-- if he is alright, where he’s been, why he didn’t write, what’s going to happen next, what exactly happened then, if he can ever forgive him, if he wants to be forgiven, if any of it still means anything-- and he says none of them. He just picks up the plates from the table and takes them to the kitchen counter, stares at the left-behind crusts Sirius didn't eat. 

Old habits die hard, or something. 

"I'll be out of your hair in the morning," Sirius says. He's staring down at the mug in his hands, still not moving, his own hair ragged and dark down his back and his nails dirty. "Round the old crew up, that's what Dumbledore said. Took me a while to track down Mundungus Fletcher too."

"Well," Remus says and it comes out short. "You're welcome to do as you please, of course. Where on earth do you plan to go?" 

The old crew. They'd all been young, then, and half of them are dead. 

"I've got a house and everything," Sirius says mulishly, then unexpectedly throws his head back and laughs. It feels rough and ragged at the edges but it sounds the same-- always a little bit too loud and a bit off color. "One thing they couldn't take away from me is the one thing I don't want," he says. "I wonder if that bloody house elf is still alive. What was it's name?" 

"I don't think I ever had the pleasure," Remus says. "You think the house is still--"

"Exactly how she left it, probably. I couldn't even take myself seriously saying that."

"I doubt very much that's what Dumbledore meant, anyway," Remus says.

"The day someone other than Dumbledore knows what Dumbledore means I'll eat my hat." 

They stare at each other across the table, and there's the weight of a decade between them which feels impossible, but also like nothing at all.

 

 

 

 

 

Sirius fills up the tub in the upstairs bathroom twice, the water grey and grimy with the dirt caked into his hair. Remus sits downstairs when the water stops running and stares out the back door towards the sea. It smells like a storm is coming in, hovering somewhere far over the ocean. It will rain later. His lungs feel compressed, like a diver's, trapped in his ribcage. Sirius moves around upstairs, not making any noise, and he catches Remus offguard when he comes down the staircase because Sirius used to always make noise, everywhere he went. His hair is wet, black, gathered over his shoulder, and he has a towel tossed over the other. Remus can see every rib in his torso, his collarbones, the empty space under his ribcage. He's hunched in on himself, like a carrion bird, and a part of Remus wants to compare him to the laughing young man he'd been, cruel and kind in equal measure. Another part of him doesn't care. 

"Do you mind?" he asks, and he shoves Remus's own hairbrush in his direction without really looking at him. "It's too long. I ought to hack it all off." 

"Sit down," Remus says, and Sirius turns one of the kitchen chairs around and sits on it backwards, resting his bare arms on its back. "We can, of course, but I can't guarantee I'll do a nice job of it." 

"My options are pretty limited," Sirius shrugs. His shoulders are cold, and Remus's hands feel too large. 

The storm rolls in.

 

 

 

 

 

Remus is very good at not getting what he wants. He’s had a lot of practice at it.

 

 

 

 

 

(1981) 

 

It hadn’t really felt real until Remus had read it in the paper, and when he read it in the paper he threw up in the bathroom sink. Autumn. They’d let him go but they hadn’t let him go back to the apartment, and James and Lily were dead and so was Peter, and so Remus went back to the last place on earth he wanted to be, grateful for once in his life that his father never tried to make small talk. He stayed there for three weeks and those weeks felt as long as an entire lifetime, and people set off fireworks across the country every night, and Sirius’s photo was in the paper.

 

 

 

 

 

He’d laughed when they locked him up, someone told him. Laughed and laughed. Of course he did.

 

 

 

 

The thing is-- the thing is that he tried.

 

He tried to promise himself he won’t think about it but he realized, weeks after he’d left the country and he’d still turn to listen for James Potter’s voice behind him, laugh to himself when he’d hear something he knew Sirius would think is funny, that it wasn't going to happen. So he gave that up in favor of other things. He talked to himself a lot, because somebody had to.

He knew it was a mistake, but it was his mistake, and that was easier to live with than the thought of questioning himself. Carrying your own mistake is like turning your own knife, turning it and turning it and it hurts but it’s your own hand doing the turning, which in a way makes it kind of funny. The kind of thing James would scowl at, if Remus had actually said it to him. Remus’s own sense of humor had always bordered on the masochistic.

When he talked to Dumbledore before their funeral he’d thought about throwing his teacup across the room, just to see what would happen, just to watch it smash. But he hadn’t. It was something his mother had bought, after all.

Remus took her photograph with him when he left the country, and her chess set. He left James and Lily’s wedding photo behind but took a picture of them that he’d snapped their last week of school. She’s laughing, eyes bright. She was seventeen.

He left everything else behind, in boxes in the attic. What’s left. A lot of it was seized as evidence.

 

He traveled until he ran out of money and then worked a job until he couldn't stay in one place any longer. And on and on like that, a series of repetition year in and year out that passed time, took him farther away from something that never stopped feeling immediate. He thought he'd have dreams about it, the kind where you can't place where and when you are, where you wake up thinking  _Maybe none of it actually happened and I'll roll over on the bed and see--_

He didn't, though. He never seemed to be able to forget how real it felt. 

Remus never asked to have many things, but he always tried to take care of the things he did have, to make them last. Until it actually mattered, anyway. It was better to be left without anything than to be left with something that wasn’t true to begin with. It scares him to think that nothing he believed was true at all. It’s worse to think the opposite. You can live with being left with nothing. It’s harder to be left with the hope that something he said, something he felt, his laugh or his touch or the light in his eyes, might have been true.

 

 

 

 

 

The thing is that they won. That’s what they tell him.

 

 

 

 

 

(1995-- even earlier)

 

The house Remus occupies is two or three miles outside the edge of the town it accompanies, so Remus has taken to riding his father’s old bicycle into town because it’s easier on his knees than walking all the way and he was never very good at driving. The had a car growing up, and it’s sitting mostly abandoned around the back of the house with no petrol in it.

Today is warm but overcast, and Remus takes his time heading back to the house. He stops at the little shop in the middle of town to get groceries and lets Mrs. Crewe, who is tiny with a giant cloud of silver hair and an attitude that hovers between brusque and motherly in a way that always makes Remus think of Madam Pomphrey, wrangle him into conversation. She tells him at length about her daughter and Remus listens politely as she packs up his groceries. 

"Take care of yourself now, you hear?" She says, when her story concludes. "I always worry about you, all alone up in that house. Just like I worried about your mother when you were away at school." Remus notices she doesn't say anything about his father, and doesn't comment on it. 

"She always spoke very highly of you," he says, and she shakes her head fondly. 

"I do mean it, though. Something broke into the shop last night! Stole three of the chickens I'd set out to sell this morning!" She widens her eyes and Remus can't tell if she's actually indicating shock or just enjoying her tale. 

"Really? Did you call the police?" 

"Goodness no, nothing like that at all. Mr. Crewe thinks it may have been a dog! We heard something crashing around against the back door in the middle of the night and he got up to shoo it off but didn't see anything except the open back door. Mrs. Carroway, you know, next door, she says she saw a big black dog wandering around when she was driving in last night. Strange, isn't it? What kind of dog can open a screen door?" 

"Very strange," Remus agrees, and he takes his groceries and gets on his bicycle. He can think of one or two. 

 

He very nearly forgets about it on his ride back home, because the day is warm if overcast and the bones in his thighs are aching. The people in this village are full of funny stories that rarely end up being true, the kind that got taller and taller the more often they got told. Little old ladies whose daughters had moved off to big cities love that kind of thing. Of course, they also used to say that you could hear wolves howling in the cliffs outside town sometimes, even though wolves hadn't been seen in these parts in decades, so maybe they found a grain of truth from time to time.

Remus is remembering some of the other tall tales the Crewes used to entertain him with as a teenager as he wheels his bicycle up the gravel drive that connects the house to the main road. He usually walks it because it's easier on his joints and the tires of the bicycle. The gravel crunches under his shoes as he goes, and he almost misses the sound of gravel under someone else's feet, somewhere up ahead towards the house. He pauses, hearing nothing, but he's lived too long to ignore the creeping, unpleasant sensation at the base of his neck. He used to discount that kind of thing, observations he knows he wouldn't have if he hadn't been bitten, because they were one more reminder of what he was and what he wasn't. But they've come in handy too many times. 

There's a smell in the air that's out of line with the afternoon air, sea breeze and dust from the road. James used to talk about how he could feel magic all the time right down in his bones, something about growing up in a home that taught him to do it before he could really walk, and that's never been something that Remus shares. But he can smell it sometimes, and hear it, and even taste it. Something in the air, something off-color and electric and strange and wild, that indicates someone nearby has done magic recently. 

He starts walking again at as casual a pace as he can manage considering his leg aches and he's pushing the bike, but he slides his wand out of his pocket as he goes, grips it loosely in one hand. His fingers slide on it, nervous. 

There's nobody around the front of the house that Remus can see but that doesn't make him feel any better. He takes a very deep breath and raises his wand hand a little. The smell is stronger here, in the back of his throat. He noticed it less when he was around it all the time, but he's the only wizard for miles around. There could be a perfectly reasonable explanation for it-- but a hundred worst case scenarios run through his mind. Death Eaters. Voldemort. Greyback--

"What," a voice behind Remus says out of nowhere, "in the name of Merlin's whiskers is that thing?" 

Remus whirls in the direction of the voice, raising his wand. There's a shadow stretching over the steps of the porch that he must have missed, somehow, and someone is sitting on the porch railing with their back to Remus and the road. 

Remus moves to raise his wand hand a little higher, gets half of the spell for a full body bind out before he sees who it is, which stops the words before they get all the way out. Remus takes a step backwards almost involuntarily, then a second. Then, his foot hits the back wheel of the bicycle and it topples over sideways, catching him in the stomach with the handlebars so Remus, bicycle and bag of groceries all fall, sideways into the garden. He's too stunned to do anything other than lie there with the bicycle, wheel spinning, on top of him. His unexpected visitor's shadow falls across his face and Remus stares up at the clouds gathering above the treetops and the face framed by the afternoon sun. 

"A bicycle? Are you riding a bicycle?" Sirius peers down at him, hair long and tangled and lit from behind where the sun is filtering through the clouds. He's gaunt, eyes shadowed and tired and cheekbones sharp in his face, Remus's heart hammers in his chest harder than it has in twelve years. 

 

 

 

 

 

(1993)

 

Dumbledore offered him a job, and Remus couldn’t turn it down. He doesn’t know if he should thank him or hit him. He does the first, of course. And then Sirius-- the irony is unbearable, and a tiny part of him expects Sirius to show up at his door. He doesn’t, of course.

It became so much more immediate at Hogwarts, because Hogwarts didn’t change hardly at all in all the time he had been gone, and there was Harry, going to class and messing around with his friends, and worrying about things he was far too young to need to worry about, like all of them had decades before. Remus had taken the train to school because of the moon the night before and his own inexpert Apparition abilities, especially when tired. He’d fallen asleep on the train, and had half awoken once or twice to pieces of a conversation he wasn’t a part of, voices belonging to a generation of kids that he was far removed from. But he hadn’t realized it was Harry until the dementor entered the cabin, and by then it was too late to do anything other than force it to leave.

When he met Harry’s eyes, because of course it was Harry, of course, of course, they were wary and shocked and a little embarrassed, and familiar in a way that hurt. _I was there when you were born,_ Remus thought. _And S-- and we all cried about it. James most of all._

The first time he’d gotten on this train his mother had sent him off with a chocolate bar in his pocket, and it had become a habit that he’d been reminded of because of the dementors.

“I haven’t poisoned that chocolate, you know,” he said, and hoped that it meant something now too.

 

Sirius Black broke into Hogwarts on Halloween and nobody was successful in figuring out where he went after he fled the Gryffindor common room, and Remus almost told Dumbledore the secret. Almost.

Harry looked like James but Remus couldn’t help thinking he was more like Lily. Of course. And when Remus found the Map all he could think was _Of course, of course of course._

So, it was hardly a surprise. Not really. In a way, Remus had been waiting.

 

When it happened, he was almost prepared for it. 

His mind struggled to make sense of it, to put it all together into a new pattern, but something in his body already knew, something way down in the pit of his stomach. It’s the moon, full in the sky and growing brighter, pressure along the length of his spine that’s always been an indicator of what will come, and it acted before his thoughts could catch up. Remus left the room at a run before he realized he was going anywhere at all.

His year at Hogwarts had felt just the length of a year, the right length, a good fit. He took only a few seconds for him to look up from the map, read the name written there, then drop it back on his desk. A few heartbeats, maybe.

  

Sirius should have been unrecognizable, but he wasn't. It's in his grin, in his laughter, in his eyes even as they're sunken into his head and hidden behind a curtain of tangled hair. It's his presence, unchanged. 

There was a time and place and this wasn't it and Remus didn't care. His own heart, fast in his chest, and his breath fast in his lungs from sprinting across the grounds, from wrestling with the possibility of what might be, beat out the seconds. Remus had spent so many years doubting, and it took less than a minute for him to  _know._

"Unless you switched--" Remus said, "without telling me?" And Sirius nodded. 

Twelve years, Remus thought. Sirius's shoulders under his hands. Their embrace lasted a fraction of a second, two heartbeats, maybe three. It could have lasted forever. 

 

Remus thinks of polar stars, celestial navigation. He's not a sailor. He keeps track of one thing and one thing only, and only because he has to. 

 

 

 

 

How exactly does one explain the passage of time? Quantum physics? Elephants all the way down? 

Some day, someone will come up with a real way to explain it. Maybe one of them will live long enough to see it. Maybe.

Remus isn't a betting man. 

Their end was marked in black on their timeline a long time before it began. Had been for years. Remus should have seen that coming. He should have seen this coming too, but the heart wants what it wants. Even his.

 

 

 

 

 

(1995-- the next morning)

 

The moon rises. Then it sets. That's what it does. 

When Sirius sits himself on the corner of Remus’s bed, passing him one mug while cradling the other in his hands, it feels momentarily so familiar that Remus’s chest aches and aches. He doesn’t know how something can be so familiar and so strange all at once.

"Are you alright?" 

“Thank you,” Remus says, and he shifts a little to a more comfortable spot, which is relative because all his muscles ache and his joints ache and even his bones and his skin aches.

“I’m fine,” Remus says automatically, and Sirius makes a noise and that’s something Remus recognizes. “I feel like shit,” he amends sheepishly.

“That would’ve been my guess.” Sirius slurps at his mug, then makes a face. “Hot.”

“I feel old,” Remus says, because he does. Sirius’s eyebrows go up.

“When the hell did that happen?” His mouth is almost mischievous, but tight in the corners.

“I don’t know,” Remus says. “I was nine. Maybe ten.” And then Sirius laughs, almost knocking over his mug.

“I think you were born old.”

“Dignified, thank you. And mummified, soon enough.”

“You and my mother’s elf heads.” Sirius shakes his head. “Decorative fun for everyone.”

“A lovely image,” Remus says. “Really improving my morning, thank you.”

“Says the man who woke up on his basement floor.”

“It’s just a little morbid.”

“I’m trying morbidity on,” Sirius says. “I think I’ve earned it after--”

“I know.”

“How do you know I wasn’t going to say all those detentions?”

“Guess I don’t.”

"It's different, isn't it?" Sirius shifts on the bed, crosses one leg over the other and then back again. The most ridiculous statement, and yet Remus knows what he means. The transformation, of course. The Wolfsbane potion, and all that goes with it. 

"It's--" he frowns. "Yes. Different. You saw." He'd smelled him some time in the middle of the night. Remus runs his tongue over his teeth-- blunt, square, except for his canines. The Wolfsbane potion feels like what it must feel like when cats are declawed. Defanged. 

"Yeah," Sirius shrugs, runs his fingers through his hair with his hand not holding his mug. "Sorry. I know you don't-- I don't know. It's been a long time. I guess I wanted to make sure I remembered it how it actually was." 

Remus never wanted any of them to watch it happen. He'd read about it when he was really young, pure horrified curiosity, had been unable to stop once he'd started. Like people trapped watching a train wreck except the wreck happened inside his own body, over and over again, once a month. Remus never saw it from the outside but he knew what it felt like, and he didn't want any of them to see it happen. 

Sirius had tried, once or twice. He wouldn't have been Sirius if he hadn't. 

"It's alright," Remus says. "But of all the things you'd want to confirm I guess I don't see why my--"

"Furry little problem?"

"Monthly gruesome transformation into something that could eat you."

"Because I didn't forget it," Sirius says, suddenly soft and vulnerable, and Remus stares at him. Sirius looks away and stares out Remus's bedroom window. It's early but the sun is already high in the sky, warm and yellow like an egg. For years he'd slept through the seasons, frozen in the ground, weathering them. Waiting for summer. And now--

"I forgot things that were happy," Sirius says, his eyes luminous and turned away. "That never was."

"No." Remus's throat hurts. His entire body hurts. "Well. I suppose I'm glad it's just as gruesome as you remember it, then."

"I never looked." Sirius's mouth twists, like it's funny. Maybe it is. "I did promise, after all. I had to keep at least one." 

 There isn't any response to that worth giving, so Remus puts his hand on Sirius's knee instead because he has to do something, close the space in between them in some way. It's July. They're sitting on the edge of it. And it's a beginning. And it's a bookend. They've lived through one war, or a thousand of them.   

 "What's going to happen next?" Remus asks, because he can't help himself. It's the kind of question James would have answered. The kind Sirius would have laughed at. 

He doesn't. He just stares back at him, his face worn and tired and beautiful. 

"Sorry--" Remus says, or starts to say, because all of a sudden Sirius leans over Remus's knees and both their teacups, the tangle of blankets and his own hands. He does it just like that, like it's nothing, and Remus knows him better than that. Sirius was always like that-- always good at looking like things were easy. They never were. 

 

They'd been twenty, twenty-one, living with the knowledge that every time someone they knew died the likelihood of it being one of them went up. They'd been seventeen, stumbling over each other's fingers and feelings and fears. Fifteen, not speaking. Thirteen, getting into trouble. 

 

Remus kisses him back like he's filling in a blank space with an answer he's kept secret for years. Twelve of them, to be exact. Just like that.

 

 

 

 

 

The moon comes up. And then it sets. Everything comes to an end. That's just what it does. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
